new RPMs ?!

[Norman Hendrich]

Hello all,

last week I finally found some time to play with gcj/libgcj again.
Building from CVS still seems to be a sort of adventure, so I used 
the RPMs (ag-tools 1.5) instead. 

The RPMS installed fine on my system (Suse 6.3), and I can compile
HelloWorld and friends!

One of the programs I got running with gcj is an instruction level simulator
for the PIC16XX microcontrollers. Using one class per instruction, the 
overhead for instruction decode is just one dynamic method lookup, so that 
we reach almost compiled code speed after JIT- or static compilation.
(Due to the additional overhead for bit masking to 8 bit wordwidth,
setting the status flags, etc., we're slower than fully recompiling
simulators for RISC machines, but around 10 million instructions per 
second is not bad: simulation runs faster than the real hardware...)

As I am the guy whose complaints started the fast-interface-despatch
discussion (a long time ago), I should probably tell you that 
gcj (-O2 --no-bounds-check) is faster on this application than the competition:
approx. 10% faster than the IBM 1.3 JDK for Linux, and 25% faster than 
JDK 1.3 beta (Hotspot Client VM). 

 
Unfortunately, I still cannot compile many of the classes I'm really
interested in, because most of the AWT classes and class stubs are
missing from ag-tools 1.5. While my program does not use the AWT classes 
at runtime (in command-line mode), I still need them for compiling... 
(removing all AWT references from my code is not an option. Compiling 
with gcj against the AWT from the JDK doesn't work either.)

Do you have plans to release new RPMs, including the latest libgcj 
patches and  AWT class stubs?

- Norman